Sexual input can be blocked by any negative influence in the psychosocial system that distracts the male. If there has been a recent quarrel and his antagonistic wife plays a passive role in their next sexual encounter, evincing no pleasure from her husband’s sexual approach, he receives no projection of her sensual interest, and therefore half his input of sexual stimuli will be blocked.
There is little sexual return for the husband or wife who feels as if he or she were approaching a wooden Indian when attempting to excite a partner sexually.
The impotent male also denies himself potential biophysical input if, as his wife approaches him with manual or orally stimulative activity, he casts himself, in the spectator role.
As he mentally stands in the corner observing her activity, impersonally watching and waiting to see if a full erection can be attained, he obviously is blocking a major degree of the sensate input created by her direct stimulative approaches.
The Same Principle Applies
If he assumes the spectator role while approaching his wife in a stimulative manner. If he “pleasures” his wife with physical skill while remaining aloof and uninvolved as an impersonal spectator, waiting to approve of any degree of erective response resulting from her obvious sensual pleasure, he again blocks the psychosocial input created by her pleasure state.
It is important to emphasize, however, that an impotent man should never attempt to give pleasure to his wife with only the concept of receiving pleasurable stimuli from her in return.
He must give of himself to his wife primarily for her pleasure, and then must allow himself to be lost in the warmth and depth of her response, and in so doing divest himself of his impersonal spectator’s role. In brief, if a man is to get the essence of a woman’s sensual warmth, he must give of himself to her. This concept has been dubbed the “give-to-get” principle.
When the male loses himself in the giving, the female’s sensate return will be reflected by positive interdigitation of his biophysical and psychosocial influences, and the erection he has tried time and again to force will develop freely when least expected.
The husband and wife is assured that no attempt ever will be made to teach a husband to achieve an erection. Emphasis is placed on the fact that erective attainment is a natural physiological process and that every man is born with the facility to erect when responding to a definitive set of biophysical and psychosocial influences.
Production of vaginal lubrication
A descriptive parallel is employed for members of the couple by suggesting to the husband that the wife’s facility for vaginal lubrication follows the same natural initiative mechanism as does erective attainment.
She cannot will, wish, or demand the production of vaginal lubrication. However, she can relax, approach her husband and be approached by him, allowing input of sensate focus from both sources while she concentrates only on the sensual pleasure arising from the mutuality of their sexual expression.
When any woman achieves this state of involvement, lubrication develops spontaneously.
In many instances it helps to point out to the husband that exactly the same anatomical tissues, the same blood supply, and the same nerve supply that are involved in penile erection for the male produce vaginal lubrication for the female.
Full penile erection is, for the male, obvious physiological evidence of a psychological demand for intromission.
In exact parallel, full vaginal lubrication for the female is obvious physiological evidence of a psychological invitation for penetration. In a comparison of male and female sexual function, it always should be emphasized that in sexual response it is the similarities of, not the differences between, the sexes that therapists find remarkable.
The Foundation has taken the position that the secret of successful therapy is not to treat the symptoms of impotence at all.
Instead, methodology consists of a direct therapeutic approach to causation. The husband and wife combines to contribute the necessary ingredients, for when approaching problems of impotence, whether primary or secondary, symptoms are not treated as they are obviated by successfully treating the marital relationship.
The marital state is under therapy at the Foundation. Never are the impotent husbands or the directly involved and frequently non orgasmic wife considered separately as patients and never as non responsive, pathological entities separate from the marital union.
